


legs are dangling off the edge

by notquitepunkrock



Series: walk through this world, feel alone [2]
Category: IT (2017), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Gen, Homophobic Language, Internalized Homophobia, Panic Attacks, Pennywise happened, Running Away, Sonia Kaspbrak's A+ Parenting, Suicidal Thoughts, also, be cautious, but (and its not mentioned) he's really truly dead, one small reference to self harm, vent fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-27
Updated: 2019-04-27
Packaged: 2020-02-07 07:46:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,367
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18616246
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notquitepunkrock/pseuds/notquitepunkrock
Summary: Eddie Kaspbrak was trapped.Eddie isn't okay. Not at all.(same universe as my stan angst fic "start smoking cigarettes so i die choking" but you really really dont need to read it to know whats happening here)





	legs are dangling off the edge

**Author's Note:**

> ahhhh im stressed about school and apparently that means spill angst on the losers club. this is a series now, so thats fun.
> 
> please be careful, dont get triggered, i'm pretty okay but this happened anyway, and ik how it feels to be in a Bad Place so basically - please be careful, be safe, and reach out for help please god. 
> 
> eddie's thinking is not healthy. don't think like eddie. recognize when you need help.

Eddie Kaspbrak was trapped.

* * *

 

He didn’t need the medicine.

Eddie knew that, objectively. He knew that ever since stupid Gretta had told him so, when she’d written LOSER in big black letters on his cast where everyone could see. His mother had tutted and frowned over that, more upset over the way the bold lettering had covered up the clean, bright, white cast than the word. The day that Bev went missing he’d spent ages sitting at the table in the kitchen, scratching a red ‘V’ over the word with shaking hands, as if that made a difference, as if no one would be able to see the original letter behind his anger. It was stupid and naive, and _so not the point._ It made him feel better, though, which he’d needed to face the clown. So.

The point is, that he knew that the medicine was all bullshit. A placebo (not gazebo, god, he’d been some kind of idiot, hadn’t he?) that his mom used to control him and the worst part was that he couldn’t even hate her for it. Not really.

The medicine was bullshit, but he took every sugar pill she placed into his hands, he sucked on the inhaler every time his chest started to squeeze. The difference was that now the pills were to appease his mom, so she didn’t start crying big, fat crocodile tears that made him feel sick inside. The difference was that now he knew that his chest wasn’t tightening because of asthma.

The difference was that now Eddie had a _choice_.

(And if maybe he hid from his mom when he coughed for fear of a useless hospital trip, or spent the weekend at Bill’s when he was sick that one time, and if he had a new, secret stash of bandaids in his room so that she wouldn’t know every time he got banged up anymore, well. That was his choice too.)

It was a _choice_ , like it hadn’t been before, and that was why he ignored the looks when he took a long, desperate puff of his _(fakefakefake)_ inhaler every time his breathing sped up and it felt like an elephant was sitting on his lungs. He ignored Bev’s soft eyes, and Richie’s stares, and everyone, and he pretended it didn’t _fucking_ matter, and it didn’t.

It didn’t.

(It did.)

Sometimes, Eddie resisted. Sometimes he remembered the way that he had felt, the power in screaming at his mom and throwing the pills and pushing past her and running away _awayaway_ and he would stop settling. He’d throw all the stupid sugar pills down the drain and ignore her whimpers and hide the inhaler and disappear for a few days, to one of the other Loser’s houses, until she begged him back hard enough that he couldn’t ignore it anymore. And then he’d go back to accepting, to choosing the easy route, and then it would get bad again and the whole process would start right back over.

Maybe he was just weak that way.

* * *

 

Normally, his friends were there. But sometimes they weren’t. The worst was when none of them were there, when no one even knew when he ran away, when he almost _disappeared_ and then he came back and pretended that nothing had happened, and no one ever knew.

It wasn’t like it was _their_ fault. It wasn’t. It was his, if everything just.

Just. His mom had been particularly insufferable, particularly bad, had taken to locking the door to his room behind him so he couldn’t “run off on her.” So he couldn’t leave. He’d been trapped, been stuck, couldn’t _fucking_ breathe. He had panic attacks on a regular basis, and she’d shoved pills and his inhaler down his throat and he could take it, could handle it but.

But Mike had come by. He was worried, was concerned that they hadn’t seen Eddie in ages, and he came to check and his mom-

His mom had said some things that were more fitting of coming out of Henry Bowers’ mouth, had said some things about Mike, about _him_ that hurt him to the core and Mike had left and he just… couldn’t do it anymore.

Because, yeah, Eddie might be a _faggy little queer_ but hearing it from his mom through the closed door, the woman who hurt him but only because she _loved_ him? That was his breaking point.

He’d run for it the next time she let him out, had ran faster than her. It wasn’t hard - he was small, and lithe, and trained with Ben for track even though she would never ever ever let him try out for a sport. _(Too dangerous, Eddiekins, too fragile, too_ _queer.)_  He’d been gone before his mom had even realized he was heading for the door, and the only things he had were the clothes on his back, a granola bar, and a bottle of bug spray that he’d thought to grab right as the door opened.

He couldn’t go to Mike’s. Not after those _things_ that his mother had said. Mike would never want to see him again, after that.

(Mike was panicked, was worried, but his dad was sick and there was nothing he could do. He spent the whole week at the hospital with Mr. Hanlon, and never knew that Eddie’d run away.)

Bev was gone for the week, heading to Portland to visit family that wasn’t her aunt. For a half-second, Eddie thought of hopping on a train, but he had no money, no way to get to her. She wouldn’t want him even if he did.

(She thought of him every day she was gone, staring at a phone that didn’t ring, anxious to go home, to see if he was alright. She never knew that he’d run.)

Richie was gone too, was visiting his cousin in Indiana, wouldn’t care anyway. Eddie was always crying to him, always having these sorts of panic attacks and trying to get away, trying to run, but he was too chickenshit to actually do anything about it. Richie had to be getting tired of it.

(If he’d known, Richie would have _run_ back to Maine. He just wanted Eddie safe.)

Ben was stuck at training camp for another week. He couldn’t just drop that to help Eddie, especially since he’d worked so hard to get on the football team last year. And even if he _could_ or he _would,_  the Camp was two towns over, and that was too far to be much of any help anyway.

(Ben would have dropped everything in a minute if he knew. Football was fun but... But Eddie was more important.)

Stan was so busy, so worried, had his own things going. He’d been retreating and retreating and retreating, and he was _hiding something_ and he didn’t need Eddie’s stupid, silly, useless problems on top of his own.

(He would gladly take Eddie’s problems without hesitation, but Eddie refused to let it happen. Stan never found out Eddie had run away that week. He would have hated himself if he found out, for not knowing.)

Bill, maybe, Eddie could have run to, except… Except there was a part of Eddie that was still small and still looked up to Bill Denbrough like he’d hung the stars in the fucking sky. He didn’t want Bill to see him like that. Broken, the way that he was.

(Bill didn’t care. He was the only one who knew, sort of, had an inkling that there was something wrong when he cycled past Eddie’s house all week and didn’t see a light in his room, heard Sonia Kaspbrak wailing and blubbering if he got too close. But he didn’t _know,_  didn’t realize how close they’d come to losing him altogether.)

* * *

Eddie had almost died that week, in the woods. Not on accident - he’d made it to the store and gotten food with a wad of cash that he kept in his shoe, that had been there since the clown, to make sure there was always a way to get supplies, to get _help_. It was balmy even at night, because it was summer, so he hadn’t needed more than the sweatshirt he’d been wearing when he left the house. Eddie was good at climbing trees, now, had learned sometime in the middle of growing older and spending the last three years in the company of Bev and Mike. He had climbed up the trees at night and spent restless nights sleeping out of the way of any lurking creatures.

He was plenty fine, if a little dirty and sweaty. But he was broken.

He’d found himself standing at the edge of the quarry, the part where they’d always been warned to stay away _(_ _too shallow, down there, to catch you; too high anyway, hitting the water would be more like hitting concrete)_  and had wandered over in front of Neibolt, which he only remembered for the danger _dangerdanger_ but not entirely what, exactly, had happened there.

(He knew he’d broken his arm there, remembered a clown’s smile with too many teeth, remembered the smell of death, but he couldn’t quite remember what it all _meant._  Not completely. Not anymore.)

He found himself staring at options to go _away_ , but in the end he’d wandered home, had scrubbed himself clean and ignored his mother’s crying, had hissed something about how she should _never lock him up again,_  and then had called up his friends and hadn’t told them it happened. As far as he was concerned it had never happened.

* * *

 

Sometimes, he wondered if maybe things would be better if he had died in that stupid sewer, decaying and disgusting and covered in disease and filth and _gray water_ . Sometimes, the leper still hissed in his ears _(_ _blowyouforanickle, blowyouforadime, helli’llblowyouforfree_ _)_  and he couldn’t make it stop.

Sometimes, he thought the only way to make it stop would be to stop breathing.

He never mentioned it to the others.

* * *

 

It wouldn’t be hard to get ahold of too many pills.

Eddie chose not to think about that.

* * *

Ben had notebooks of poetry that he never let go of and never let anyone else touch. Bill had sketchbooks, had notebooks filled with short, horrible stories that chilled you to the core. Stan’s notebooks were stashed in his night table drawer right along with all the rest of his secrets, and no one knew what was in them. Bev kept notebooks filled with designs and pattern plans. Mike kept dozens of notebooks for school - some of them actually for class, most of them for doodling and drifting and notepassing, with memories glued between the pages. Richie didn’t have any notebooks, but he kept boxes and boxes of polaroids stashed under his bed, and rotating cast of them adorned the walls of his bedroom.

Eddie kept a notebook full of notes.

It was morbid, he knew, to plan for the _just in case_ the way that he did. It was wrong to write and rewrite the letters to his friends, to keep them all in a pale blue journal that he never let the others touch. (Richie had tried once, and Eddie had screamed right there in the middle of the cafeteria. He didn’t try again.)

They all started out the same way, after the addressee.

_(Dear Mom-Ben-Mike-Bill-Stan-Rich-Bev-Dad-Georgie-EveryoneIveEverLoved_ , _I’m so sorry...)_

It was the what came after that changed - the reasons, the pleas, the memories. Sometimes he wrote about the clown, the leper, about seeing Bev floating in the air with dead eyes, about the missing posters and the pills and clowns _clownsclowns._  Sometimes he wrote about summers with his friends, about listening to music, about laughter, about all the good things so that they’d have something good to remember him by. Sometimes he wrote about running away, about tears, about the times he slipped out of the house and wandered Derry and didn’t care what happened to him.

Most of the time he never meant to use them.

Sometimes he did, but he didn’t like to think about those times.

* * *

Stan was smoking cigarettes, and Eddie yelled at him for it. Stan was hurting himself, and Eddie started crying. Stan wanted to die and all Eddie could see in his eyes was himself.

Eventually, Stan got better, but Eddie was still drowning.

No one noticed.

* * *

He thought that Richie maybe knew. There was something in his eyes that said that he knew the bad jokes weren’t just jokes, not always. Sometimes, but not always. Eddie sucked on his inhaler seven times the night he realized, forcing medicine into his lungs that didn’t exist, begging himself to just believe in the placebo again for one night.

He thought about running away again, but the next morning his mother cried big, sniffly, sobbing tears that made him feel awful inside and out.

At least she never went near the lock.

At least she hadn’t called him a queer behind his back, again.

He wrote a letter to Richie, and had to work to keep tears from falling onto the paper.

* * *

Dinner with his mother was always awkward, now. She would wheeze and whine and give him plates with exacting portions, perfect for a growing boy, and she eyed him carefully until he ate every last bite. He didn’t ever dare tell her if he felt sick or had no appetite - she would have a reason for that, would fill him full of pills and medicine that he didn’t need. Eddie wondered if his liver was ruined by the number of painkillers she’d made him take as a child. Eddie wasn’t good with pain, never had been, and he wondered if maybe that was why.

He choked down his food until he could be excused, and prayed that she didn’t follow him down the hall.

The inhaler was empty, now, more often than not. Eddie went through it fast, faster, maybe, than he had when he thought he needed it. Panic attacks came hard and fast and stole the breath from his lungs, and there was no one who could stop him. At night he cried for someone to help him.

_(StanMikeBenBevBillRichie.)_

At night he cried for it all to stop.

* * *

The pale blue notebook was pried out of his arms in the middle of a panic attack that had crept up unprompted and stolen Eddie away, pressing him into the back of his own consciousness until he was gasping and sobbing and curling his hands into himself. He had the notebook clutched in his arms, pressed close to his chest - Eddie had taken to carrying it around, to scribbling notes in the dark moments of his mind, when he thought the others weren’t looking and sometimes when they were. He held it like there was something dangerous inside.

That had been the red flag for his friends.

Richie was fluttering around, hissing _"_ _he’s hurting himself ”_ under his breath, because Eddie’s nails were pressing _pressingpressing_ into his soft skin and his teeth were biting _bitingbiting_ into his lower lip and he was leaving gouging scratches along his biceps as he tried to keep his panic contained. Richie was searching for large, soft blankets at Bev’s instruction, ransacking the linen closet of Mike’s house. Eddie mentally apologized to Mrs. Hanlon for ruining her closets, even though he knew that Mike would set them right later.

Bev was trying to get him to breathe, her hands pressing into his ankles - practically sitting on his feet, really - to keep him from kicking, from hurting anyone. A bruise was blossoming across her shins, from Eddie’s desperation, and his lungs seized even more at the sight, but she was whispering gentle words and not paying it any mind.

Stan didn’t seem to know what to do, so he drifted away with a determined set to his jaw, gathering fallen popcorn kernels into his small hands, wearing a steady trail between the living room and the kitchen trash can. He lined spilt cans of soda up and got towels, and readied a glass of lavender water from the pitcher Mrs. Hanlon kept in the fridge, and quite pointedly didn’t look at Eddie, but he also didn’t leave for more than a few moments, and he didn’t turn on the vacuum either.

It took both Ben and Mike to hold him down, to stop his frantic screaming and shaking and keep his fingers from scratch _scratchscratching_ into his skin. They were strong from football practice, and Mike had years of heavy-lifting and farm work under his belt. Mike curled around Eddie’s back, pressing him still into his chest, and Ben gently cradled his head even as he slammed it back against Mike’s chest. Eddie knew he was hurting them but he couldn’t stop, the panic and fear seizing his body until all he wanted was to _run_ and to _hurt_ and to make it all _stop._

It had been Bill who grabbed the notebook, who pried it out of his arms and whisked away so that Ben could gently grab his hands, could stop Eddie from making himself bleed. There was a gasp, a rustling of papers, and then Bill whispering to Stan, to Bev, to everyone, and then their faces grew drawn and panicked and _ohnoohgodtheyknewtheyknewtheyknew._

Ages later, when he calmed down, he braced for an interrogation, but they said nothing. Bev asked if those kinds of panic attacks that mixed and twisted into meltdowns happened often. Eddie was too embarrassed to say yes, curling instead into the large soft blanket and drinking the lavender water that Stan handed him and pretending to fall asleep so he didn’t have to talk.

* * *

They asked. They asked and Eddie didn’t know what to tell them. He wanted to lie, to make up some bullshit excuse, but there were his words, his _I’m so sorry_ s, his handwriting scrawled across page after page. There were tears there, and dirt, and maybe a little blood sometimes, and it was so fucking _obvious_ what they meant. He couldn’t lie.

And God, they all looked so broken _(_ _just like him)_  that he had to tell them, tell them about the wanting to run away, the times he _did_ run away, about the word _queer_ and _fag_ and all the awful things that his mother had said to Mike (Mike’s face had gone ashy and gray when he read that one), and there was no running away from that.

Eddie tried, but Ben caught him before he could make it past Bill’s kitchen doorway. (Stupid track team, making Ben faster than Eddie.)

Telling them hurt. It made Bev cry, and it made Richie mad, and it made Stan go quiet. It hurt so much more than Eddie could have imagined but…

But suddenly they were bursting into his room and piling his things into garbage bags and barricading the door against his mother, even as she threw herself against it sobbed and screamed. They pulled the pictures off the walls, and the sheets off the bed, shoved all the clothes he loved into bags and abandoned all of the clothes he hated, pressed first aid kits and bandaids into backpacks.

Between the seven of them, they gathered all the important things - the photos he’d hidden from his mother, the tiny rainbow pin he’d stolen from the lost and found at school, the few stuffed animals who’d made it through his fourteen-year-old fit of maturity, the stash of spare change at the back of his closet. Richie found the inhaler and lobbed it at the wall so hard it made a hole, got stuck for a few seconds before falling to the ground. It still wasn’t enough. Eddie threw it out the window and into the street.

And then they shoved his things out the window, because his mother was still pounding on the door and heaving great, horrible sobs, and scurried out themselves. Eddie called a tearful goodbye, told her that he would be back to visit, “but not to live here, I can’t keep suffocating, this is for me, I still love you, Mommy,” and then he was gone.

 

And then Eddie Kaspbrak was free.

**Author's Note:**

> title from bullet by hollywood undead


End file.
